details

well, i am officially on my first army detail of the deployment. and if this is the way that details go, we of the flight companies have it pretty darn easy. i have been sitting in front of a computer since 2000 keeping track of people who are using the phone and the internet. if all of the phones or computers are full i keep track of who is next in line and when they get to get on the computer. there is a little program that runs on the computer that keeps track of how long people are on so all i have to do is tell them that they need to get off if they are on for over 30 minutes with people in line. and now that it has gotten later here, all i have to do is say phone or internet, and click the start or stop button when people come or go. after this is over i have to go do maintenance for a while, but i can't complain. i am not sitting in a guard tower for a week straight and i am not watching iraqis fill sandbags. so this is pretty nice.
things here are going really well. we hauled a senator around the other day and i got a really cool shot of the other helicopter and one of the escort aircraft that was flying along with us. if i have the time i am going to try and add it to the post. if i can't i will add it when i get a little bit more time. i am currently waiting for my replacement to show up and relieve me so that i can go eat something before i go do maintenance.
so the image should be in there, but we will have to see... i haven't added images before as you can tell.

hey!

Things here are going really well, things have been really busy with the new mission set that we picked up a few weeks ago, so i have been flying almost everyday. this mission is a good one because it goes out in the afternoon and it comes back in at night so you get some day flight time and some night flight time. the one thing about this mission is that you need to remain flexible. we can't get to the helicopters without there being a mission change, but after the first week, we were quite used to it, and started planning for the changes to happen. we have had days where we have flown all over the place to get people and accomplished nothing and days where we barely flew anywhere and we got a lot done.
there was one day that we took off out of here and we picked up a few guys from romania who were just trying to get home. we had to go pretty far south past baghdad and we had a head wind so it took a lot longer, instead of a 1 hour flight it was almost two. and on top of it the weather was starting to get bad, so it was hard to see where we were going. from there we had to fly out east past baghdad and when we got there we shut down to switch from days to nights, and they found out that the weather was bad so we decided to wait it out... remember that the romanians have already been with us for about 4 hours. once they decided that we were going to wait it out, we went to go get some chow. about 5 minutes after we went to get chow, one of the pilots came and told us that we had to get going right away because there was a c-130 waiting for our passenger to get him to where he wanted to be, but we had to get him from where he was because the c-130 can't land that the base that he was at. so we picked up and went out to the birds... poor romanians didn't get to eat anything either. we went over to the base that we were supposed to pick up this guy at, and when they get there they say that now that we are there we are the back up because he is going to get picked up by some ofsprey that are coming in. so we shut down there too. we couldn't get any further west because of the weather, but the romanians needed to get into baghdad so that they could get home. luckily they had an extra day planned into their trip because we ended up going back home after that place, and they made it down to baghdad the next day in the morning. so they spent about 9 hours touring iraq to get back where they started. we felt so bad for them.
well, i need to get to work so i will hopefully write again soon.
hope everyon is doing well back home!

good story

here a good story to tell about what it is like around here and how fast the weather can change.
wednesday we were flying one of the missions and we had some VIP pax that needed to head out east from bagdad. when we started the mission we briefed, the weather and it was supposed to be hazy but clear. that is normal for bagdad so we didn't flinch. we flew down to the big airport in bagdad to refuel before we picked up our VIPs and there were no problems there either. hopped over to the place that we were picking up our VIPs and got them all loaded up. when we left there it was hazy like it was forcasted and so we didn't even think about it. but we started flying east to where we were supposed to be dropping people off, and all of a sudden it is sandy all over the place, and the visibility is getting worse. we start to take heed to the fact that we can't see as far as we used to, but we only need to be able to see a mile to continue on... well as we kept going through it kept getting worse and worse. the Lead pilot called that if it got any worse that we were going to have to go back to where we came from. no less than about a minute later they called that we were going to turn around. we were flying about 800 feet and we could barely see the ground. it was very sandy and a little bit nerve racking not being able to see very much of what is going on. so we went back to the place that we picked the VIPs up from did some weather checking to see if we were going to be able to get them to where they needed to be going, and when it came back that it was going to be too late for us to do anything we flew back home.
one of the more entertaining things to look back on now, was the face of the 1 star admiral that was sitting right next to me as we were getting deeper and deeper into the sandstorm. as the visibility got less and lass his face started dropping and he started looking more and more worried. and when we turned around, i let him know by writing a little message on my clip board with a dry erase marker, and when he saw that we were going back he was definatly relieved. when we got out for a little while all he could say was "you made the right choice" it was a little comical to say the least. specially because this guy was about 6 foot 6 and made me look like a midget.
well, i should be getting to bed. i hope that everything is going well for you back home!
Signing off

Back on days

Things have been going well here. i am back on the day schedule again and i am flying a lot. i have been on our steady day mission the last two days and have logged at least 5 hours of flight time each time, and tomorrow i am on the mission that flies a little less often, but it is flying tomorrow. i am excited any day that i get to fly. not that maintenance is a bad thing, i just like to fly better...
i figured that i would let everyone know a little bit more about what it is like to live here, since most of what i talk about is missions and flying. we as lower enlisted live 2 to a room. it is about a 12x12 room, not too big not to small. when you move in you have a bed, a wall locker and two sets of chests one with 3 drawers and one with 2. both about a foot wide with different heights depending on amount of drawers. right now in our room we have all of those things, but we have built lofts for our beds so that we can a little bit more space in the room. we have both also built desks for our computers and such things. there is a TV, and a mini fridge like the ones that you buy for a dorm room, and some gaming consoles. i have my side of the room and my roommate has his, but we get along really so everything here is cool. we have known each other for about 3 years now. we met right after i signed up for the guard, and we have been working together ever since. we were both in the same AIT he was one class behind me, the we were both in the same med unit. and we both got transfered here to the Air Assault unit. when we started flight training we went through most of it at the same time so when we get to fly together on the rare occasion (which happened today) we can judge what the other person is going to do most of the time, and we often say the same thing at the same time. so we get along real well.
chow happens here 4 times daily: breakfast, lunch, dinner and midrats. it is all free, or you can go eat at one of the fast food places that they have here, that are open most of the day. the food here is decent, the fast food is just ok... not as good as it is back home, but it is still a nice change of pace from the defac every once in a while.
we don't have to do our own laundry here which is a perk. there is a service that you can take no more than 6 kg of laundry and turn it in every other day and have clean clothes. now 6 kg may not sound like a lot, but i have gone 10 days without turning in laundry and not hit that number. so what they do for free for us is really good.
well, i need to get to bed! i hope that all is well back home and i miss you all!
Signing off

hello all,
things are going well here, i had my first mission flight in 3 weeks yesterday, that was a lot of fun to get back into. i had lost the system that i had all set up for getting ready to go fly, but once i got that going, everything went smoothly. we went through the test fire area and the 1st sergeant managed to hit a bird. we basically did two separate missions last night. we moved people around bagdad last night and then we moved people around north east iraq. we even had a break in the middle. we were all over getting to where we needed to be early. last night we would get to the places early enough that we would have to sit for 5-10 minutes before we left to the next place, then we would still have to sit there. but it was pretty cool because we had a good crew and had some good conversations. after our trip to bagdad we came back here for a break, the crew here had dinner for us, they had a bunch of food for us, and because two of our pilots had their birthdays yesterday they brought us a cake from the chow hall too. it was pretty entertaining. after that we brought a bunch of people to NE iraq. we did that pretty fast too. we landed in one place and they told us that the people that we were supposed to be picking up were going to get on a set of snooks that were coming behind us. so we got out of their really early. and that pushed our entire timetable forward. we got home really early and the guys back here were so bored that they did our dailies for us and we got out of their really fast. after that i had to try and stay awake for a while because i have to be at work until 0630 tomorrow morning. but i don't start til 1830 today so it shouldn't be too bad.
well, i need to get ready for work so i will talk to you all again soon!
hope everything is going well for everyone, and stay safe!
Signing off

Finally!!!

i would like to begin by saying that i hope that this is the first of many posts that will be coming. and second that with, i am sorry that the past posts have been few and far between.
we just recently got the internet hooked up in my room so things should be getting better.
me, being the nice guy that i am (and the only computer nerd in the group) have been setting up everyone's internet. so since the internet has been up i have had about 30 minutes of time to get anything done on it. i actually had to stay away from my room tonight just so that i wouldn't have to fix anything or make sure that someone didn't screw up their connection already. i don't mind helping, but i need to get some time off too. if you count the time that i spend setting up the internet after work it is about a 16 or 17 hour day for me. so i can use a day away from all of this. luckily i am going to nights for the next two weeks so i am going to be off from most peoples' schedule and i can work on their problems on my time. ok, rant over.
other than the internet things have been going well here. i haven't been flying, but i have been learning a lot about what goes on in one of the major maintenance events that the helicopter goes through. i have been working with the civilian contractors on one of the birds that is going through what we call phase. it is a two part inspection occurring about every 350 hours. alternating different inspections on the 2 different types. basically we did one of the two thorough checks on all of the aircraft systems. it takes about 12 days to complete at the fastest. but we had some major things need to be changed so it has taken a little bit longer. i learned a lot of different things about the aircraft and a lot of different things that should be checked on our daily maintenance too.
sorry that this one is a little short, but they will be coming more often now so i am going to go to bed right now. i will talk to you all soon.
i hope that everyone back home is doing well
Signing off

some questions answered

I wrote this a couple of days ago but i was too tired to get here and put it out on the web. so i am putting it out now! sorry about the delay between posts!

Hello all,
Things are going well here. Uncle Gary asked a few questions that I thought that I would try and answer so that you can understand without being too specific so that I don’t say or give away anything that I shouldn’t. First, most of the flying that goes on here is done at night. There are a few missions that go out during the day, but most of the time they are specific missions with very little flight time, just moving someone important from one place to another. I have already accrued about 20 hours of night flight and I have only been on about 8 flights with 3 of them being during the day.
We take precautions when we fly that we start long before we start flying. Even the missions that have the same basic principal keep changing so to stay a step ahead of the enemy. Once we have a mission in our hands so that we know what we are going to be doing, the pilots plan out a route, avoiding all sorts of known bad areas and entering high traffic areas differently each time. Once that planning is done we get the whole crew together and we do a mission brief. Walking through what we will be doing and where we will be going. One of the things that happens is we get a brief from the intel guys about what has been happening along our route to keep up on our toes when we go into an area where we know that bad things could happen.
Once we get out and flying there are a lot of different things that keep us safe. For one we never fly the same route twice. We don’t take a canned route that has been planned and just go the same route over again. We also do what is called three dimensional flight, moving left and right, up and down so that we aren’t an easy target going across the sky. Now this doesn’t mean that we fly like Tom Cruise in top gun, just simple altitude changes or direction changes that keep out flight path moving. All of our night flights are done under NVGs (night vision goggles) so that we can see in what would be almost pitch-black conditions. The helicopter has different countermeasures both passive and active that keep us safe from some of the bigger weapons that could be used against us. It has a system to dissipate heat from the engines. Different IR sensing equipment and flares to thwart off missile attacks. The flares go off right past the crew chief windows, and though I had seen them go off before in the daylight, last night was the first time that I had it happen under NVGs and it was quite an experience. They look like fireworks that don’t go off with a bang at the end.
With all of these things going on before and during a flight I feel pretty safe. I doesn’t make me feel like I am not threatened, because I know that every time that I get into that helicopter there could be a chance that someone is going to try and shoot at us, but with all of the precautions that we take things are pretty safe up in the air.
Just last night was a good example of the reason why we can’t get complacent when we are flying. Everything is ok and nobody was close to being hurt but it was just the idea behind what happened. We were flying out of Balad when someone on the ground decided that they wanted to shoot at us. Now, you have to understand the people who are trying to hurt us sometimes aren’t that smart. When we fly at night if you look out under the NVGs it is pitch dark, so they can’t see anywhere near where we actually are, but they can usually hear us. We can’t hide that, so they shoot at our sound. The guy probably unloaded a mag of AK rounds up into the air, but he had no chance of even coming close to hitting us.
Well, it is getting late here; I have to get some sleep because I have to fly tomorrow. I hope that everyone at home is doing well and staying safe. Gary, I will try and answer some more of your questions when I get a chance if i didn't already answer them. If anyone else has any questions feel free to ask, and I will do my best to answer them.
Signing off

hey all, things are going well here, i just spent the last couple of days on day maintenance. we have been getting a lot of things done. we just had the change of command ceremony from the 108th to the 2/147th here and now we are on our own. we are getting ready to switch to a new set of missions, and we will be getting into our schedule that we will be following for a while soon. i have a few flights coming up, which is going to be nice. i am going back to night shift for a while so things are going to be a little cooler while i work.
well, i just have a little bit of time today so i have to get going again. sorry for the short post, but things are going well and i will update more when i get a chance.
hope everyone is doing well at home!
Signing off

hello all,
I am safe in balad, sorry that i haven't updated my postings in a while, things have been kind of on weird schedules and they have been changing a lot so most of the time i get just enough time to check my e-mail while i am on the net. things are going well here. we have been getting a lot done in the short time that we have been here in balad. we are all moved into our housing, it was good that we got to move in right away it is nice that we won't have to move until right before we leave. it is nice to know where home is for a while. other than that. we have 2 12 hour maintenance shifts so either you are on during the day or you are on at night. the last couple of days i have been on during the day, but most of the time you are on during the night, the day crew is small because there isn't a lot of flying going on then. I had my 2 train up flights a few days ago, they were pretty interesting. we got to fly over bagdad the first day and we transported some people to work on a downed umanned aircraft the second. the second mission was really cool because it is a little different than the normal mission that we will be going on, which is hopping from FOB to FOB bringing people back and forth. we got to land off base and help people recover some equipment and then load the UAV onto a flat bed.
well, sorry this was short, but i have to get back to work. I will post again soon!
Hope things are going well at home and everyone is safe
Signing off

another short one

I figure that i will give a little explaination of the posts that i just put up. i haven't had internet on my computer for a while so i have been doing most of my internet work from a public computer. now i have finally had a chance to get my computer on the net so i am posting these for you. things are going well over here... i am on the night recovery crew today so i don't need to be out to the airfield until about 8 pm. so i am going to relax today and just chill for a while.
still missing everyone and i hope things are going well at home
Signing off

a week in

Well, we have been here for a week now and things are finally picking up. About two days ago we started getting our aircraft in from the port. The first couple of days were pretty much just getting used to the heat. Other than that we had a few classes that we had to take, but most of them only lasted for about an hour and the rest of the time we just had to hang out seeing the sites (not much… mainly sand and… sand and… yeah, more sand.) You can only go to the PX and the Internet Café so many times before you get bored. Other than that, I have beat the original final fantasy, finished a book that I started on the flight over here. Gotten plenty of sleep.
Now that the aircraft are here we have finally gotten to start doing what we are supposed to be doing. Tomorrow morning is my first flight since leaving Fort Sill over a month ago. For the last three days we have been getting the helicopters ready for all of the sand and making them safer for the crew by putting in ballistic plates. When we flew the helicopters to port back in the states we loaded them all up with a ton of equipment to get them shipped over here, and now that they are here we had to unload all of them. Today we did a bunch of dailies to make sure that the birds are ready to go when we start flying them tomorrow. The flight schedule for tomorrow is pretty crazy busy. EVERYBODY from A Co. is flying at least an hour. Some of our trainers are flying 4 hours. That is going to be a long day.
hope that everyong is doing ok, miss you all
Signing off

Firsrt day in Kuwait

Hey,
Well this brings about the end of the first full day in Kuwait. I know that by the time that you are reading this the first full day will have been over for quite a bit of time, but I am doing my best to keep up so that when I do post these it won’t be 1 huge long post that will be horrible to read. Yesterday we traveled here by dc-10 that is a huge airplane and it was just about full. We had 2 stops between here and when we took off. The first was in banger maine and the second was in Shannon Ireland. The first leg of the trip was the shortest only around 3 hours or so. The second one was about 6 hours and the third closer to 8. It was weird because we left about noon on Saturday and didn’t get here until about 5 pm on Sunday, and after that we still had a 2 hour bus ride from the airport in Kuwait city to Udairi Kuwait. We are staying in a 50 man tent with all of the males from alpha company. The weather here is sunny and hot. The sun comes up around 5 or 6 here… really early, and it sets really early too… around 7 or so. During the day the temperature gets up to 130 as a high (which it was today) and it drops to about 90-95 at night. When they talk about it being a dry heat you really know the difference once you have felt the temperatures here. When we were in Oklahoma, it was very humid and it only got up to about 100 there, but it felt hotter there and it was more physically draining there because you sweated a lot more. Here there is no moisture in the air so there is almost no humidity so it is really hot, but it isn’t any worse than being in Oklahoma. The base is pretty nice there are 3 different chow halls and 4 meals a day if you want to eat them. We had today to acclimate to the weather and tomorrow we will start some sort of training I think that it is just going to be classroom type stuff. Oh and by the way… everything over here is airconditioned so unless you have to spend the whole day outside you don’t get too hot overall. Well, I am going to get some sleep.
Hope that everyone at home is doing well, and keeping safe
Signing off

just a short one

I just wanted to let everyone know that i am doing ok and that i am safely in Kuwait. i will update this again soon when i get a chance. i am going to be putting a few posts on at a time when i get a chance, i wrote one last night in word because i don't have the internet on my computer, and i am still not on my computer so i will be posting them when i get a chance. Things here are going well, have spent some time getting used to the heat other than that things are going well.
I hope that everyone at home is staying safe and that they are having fun.
Signing off

Getting ready to go

I said that i would start up my blog again when i was getting ready to go... so here it is. i am back in oklahoma again, waiting to go to kuwait. we have a very large room comparatively here in oklahoma and all of the floor was covered with equipment, with exception of the walkways.
today we have all of our bags packed and they are waiting in the hallway to get loaded up to get on the airplane and the room is very open right now because of the lack of equipment. i took the time and cleaned up about 1/2 the floor by hand, well, i guess you could say by foot. i used a scottbrite pad and a mop to scrub all of the dirt off of the floor. the other half of the room hasn't been done et, but someone else is going to do that so i am good to go on that. all i have left to pack is my computer equipment and all of the other stuff that i am going to bring on the plane. when we take off we have a 24 hour plane ride ahead of us. i have no idea of where we are going to be stopping, but it is going to be a lot of time spent on a plane and just enough time to get off and stretch our legs while they re-fuel. this is just a short entry, but it will be getting better as the days go by. i will talk to you all soon, but it may be a couple of days...
hope that everyone at home is still ok, and i miss you all
Signing off

Texas... Here I Come

So my great adventure for the week was going down to Texas. it is the only time that i have set foot off post, while not attached to the helicopter... well, the helicopter did get me down there. the helicopters are getting shipped to iraq because it would be a really long flight and they would have to set up a ton of fuel stops along the way considering we can probably fly 3 hours max on a full bag of gas. they are now waiting for their ship to sail. they will be going by boat to kuwait where they will be meeting us and we will be flying them to balad.
the trip down to texas was a bit interesting for us. there were many factors for what would happen on the flight down, and most of them ALMOST happened but none of the did. first we had to do run-ups the day before so that we could leave right away the next morning. we do something called hit-checks that determine the condition of our engines. one of our engines was in the watch - but still good range. the morning checks went well and the take off went without a glitch. at the first fuel stop while shutting down we were attacked by gremlins. one of our generators unexpectedly shut off while we were shutting down. that would have caused us some major problems for the next start up. when we went to start it back up the generator worked just fine for the rest of the trip. at the second fuel stop we had to devert our course to avoid weather on our original flight path. and there was a chance that we weren't going to make it to corpus christi before the weather was in a position that we couldn't fly around. but we ended up making it down to corpus with out that bothering us. there was one fuel stop in between there and corpus, and after that fuel stop, the fifth and final aircraft and a momentary problem that it almost had to PL for. and we were the 4th bird so we would have had to go with them. they fixed their problem and we made it the rest of the way without incident. when we landed in corpus we met the guy who was in charge of getting our birds on the ship. he told us that we would be flying the birds right onto the pier that the boat was docked on. that was one of the coolest flights that i have been on. we flew down the shipping channel to the end and then circled back around to the pier, but in doing so we flew over the bridge that crossed the shipping channel and the over the retired aircraft carrier the USS Lexington. landing on the pier was an en experience in and upon itself. there was probably about 15 feet of cushion between a crane, where we set the aircraft and the ocean. i was watching the tail while the pilots were watching the rotorblades, to get it on the ground and not in the water or breaking a blade.
after we got everything situated for the ground crew that was going to be taking care of the birds we got to go grab a bite to eat, i have to say that this was probably the worst part of the whole trip. we ended up going to a sports bar for dinner and i was definately more of a bar than a restaurant and we weren't allowed to drink. now this would have been fine if under different circumstances, if we had gone someplace like mcdonalds we wouldn't have had a problem, but they took us to a bar and then they decided to stay there for 3 hours while we waited for the last two helicopters that were coming from somewhere else to come in. that is cruel and unusual punishment if you ask me. for 3 hours leaving 15 guys who haven't had a beer in almost 3 months in a bar and tell them that they can't drink.
when the second crew finally arrived we hopped on the bus for our 10 hour ride home. it was 1830 and we had a long ride ahead of us. i was totally expecting this to be pretty bad, being tall and stuck on a bus is not very fun. but i got really lucky, because of the lack of personnel on the flights there were ample seats, and i ended up with a seat in front of me that was turned around facing backwards. it as nice because my legs weren't cramped at all. it ahd to be one of the best bus rides that i have ever taken. we watched caddy shack, beerfest and tombstone which are all really good movies, then we turned off the dvd's and got some rest. it was nice because we worked for about 24 hours if you include the bus ride so we ended up getting the whole next day off too.
just a side note... i really miss my sunny... the tv is on as backround noise for a couple of the guys in here right now, and i just saw a commercial that made me thing of him. there was a big bulldog that was holding onto his favorite toy, and when his owner came home he excitedly dropped it on the floor. the owner bends over and sets down a puppy bulldog that looked exactly like him. they look at each other for a second and then the big bulldog pushes the toy at the little bulldog and the puppy grabs the toy and starts playing with it. the family ends up at the pet store buying another of the same toy. it was a really cute commercial and it makes me miss my doggy!
well i must be getting to sleep i have a class that i need to be at bright and early tomorrow.
i hope that everyone back home is doing well.
Signing Off

catching back up

sorry everybody i know that i haven't posted in a while here is the update. things have been really hectic down here lately. for the last two weeks we have been flying with the First Army aviation trainers. we have been getting down and dirty into what we will be doing in the sandbox. last week was the actual evaluation period and the week before that was a lot of preparation for last week. almost every day in the last two weeks we have had 6 helicopters a day flying. that means that we had 12 crew chiefs and 12 pilots flying each day at least. some days there were more and on sunday (a week ago we had only 2 ships flying, but that was the exception.) i flew three days last week. monday i had a day off to get ready for the up coming week. most people had reset days scattered throughout the week to get them some down time. i flew on tuesday, friday and saturday. tuesday was a very interesting day because we had some mishaps happen on monday that everyone who was working on monday knew that i had found out second hand. there was a flight of two that went out and they had briefed that they were going to be flying doors closed (the big cargo doors.) well, they decided that they wanted to fly doors open. which normally would not have been a problem but they forgot to strap the laptop which we keep aircraft information on and it fell out of the aircraft in mid-flight. so that entire crew ended up getting grounded and we had to make some changes to the schedule (that is why i ended up on the schedule on friday which i originally wasn't on.) but i digress tuesday was a good flight me and my fellow crew chief did quite well with the control of the passengers that we had on board. on all of our flights we had observers from First Army that were there to get the wheels turning in our head about different things that we should be doing in country.
wednesday was a maintenance day for me. i came in and did a lot of different menial tasks that needed to get done for the different aircraft. it was pretty boring but i knew that it needed to get done. i did a lot of that til about 2200 or so and then we started getting ready to recover the aircraft for the next day. i worked on all 4 of the aircraft that were out during the night period to make sure that all of the inspections that need to be done after the flights got finished. i got back from the hanger about 0230 that night. thursday i started about the same time and did some more little stuff for the afternoon then had to start getting the aircraft tied down because there was bad weather coming in. each time that the pilots would get the all clear on the weather, it would get worse. i think we tied down the aircraft about 4 times that day. they finally made a weather call, and canceled the flights about 2100 and we made it home about 2200.
friday i needed to start at 12oo because that is when our mission time started. one of the main considerations that we have when we fly is the weather, and thursday was not a good day for weather around fort sill. at for sill the weather was great. it was partly sunny but not too hot most of the time. don't get me wrong there was some rain at the airfield, but most of the evening it was nice there. the problem was that everywhere around fort sill was really dark and rainy and we had to go out there to complete our mission so we couldn't go. we hung out by the aircraft for probably better than 3-4 hours to show that we were ready to go if we ever got the weather clear, but it never happened.
Saturday was the big day for us. we had a AA (Air Assault) mission that took ships from all 4 aircraft. i am not going to get into too much detail because there were some things that happened that if our trainers had set things up correctly probably wouldn't have happened, but they didn't so we had some confusion with what was going on at the drop off point. other than that we did really well being where we needed to be when we needed to be there. it was a big orginization of ships that had to do everything by a time line that all but told you when you could go to the bathroom. but when it comes down to it, when there are 15 aircraft having a schedule like that makes sure that if you are going to have issues they are all addressed long before the mission starts. we had our aircraft ready to go about 4 hours before the mission happened so that we knew that the birds that we were on were in good working order and we didn't need to switch to the back-up aircraft. other than the misunderstanding we had at the drop off point everything went off without a hitch and we all made it back safely.
today was a nice relaxing day for us after two weeks of craziness. we didn't have too much to do today. we had a AAR (after action review) for the training we went through with first army. that took up most of the morning. in the afternoon we took a battalion photo out at the airfield, then we had a pretend memorial service for a soldier that was "killed" this week during our training. they wanted the battalion to do this so that we knew what one would be like. it was very interesting actually. the one thing that kind of got to me was the role call that was taken. at the end of the service they do a short role call, calling out a few names of soldiers that are at the formation, and then they call out the soldier that has passed. that silence is one of the eeriest things that i have ever heard. they call out the name three times. and it is dead silent. really eerie.
just a side story to with all of this: the army has a very standardized set up for a memorial display which includes a rifle, helmet, dogtags, body armor and boots. we had the memorial ceremony set up for before we took the battalion picture so that when it was done we could get the service started right away. rifles in the army are supposed to be watched at all times, but because we were out side they left the rifle where it was in the memorial. to most soldiers taking the rifle out of a memorial would be like tipping a grave stone over, so we left it there. when we got back the rifle and the bayonet that we used to put it in the sand bags were gone. in it's place was a note that said that if the person who left the rifle was there wanted it back that they needed to call SFC so-and-so... well to begin with the weapon belonged to our 1SG (two ranks higher than the SFC) who was not happy to come back to see the display all screwed up and his rifle missing... so he talked to our CSM (highest NCO in our Battalion who called this SFC and gave him an ear full. this SFC decided that he didn't do anything wrong and so that he didn't get too much of a chewing out by our CSM he brought a Warrant officer with him (who technically out ranks our CSM) to back him up. so when he gets out there he gets the ear full that he didn't want, and our CSM tells the warrant officer to in not so few words to shut up while he is telling this SFC off. i thought that this was pretty entertaining. for all of you who don't know the rank structure very well, i know that i abbreviated a of this for ease of typing. http://www.gruntsmilitary.com/rank2.shtml is a good place for you to go to see what i am talking about.
well, that is all for now folks we had a pretty easy rest of the evening hanging out at the barracks. I hope that everyone had a very nice fathers day and a good weekend in general.
Signing off

Memorial Day Weekend

Hello all,
It has been a good weekend. The command has been off post all week for an ATX (a week in the field.) so one of the W4s has been running the flight schedules. one of the nice things about that is we start the night flights at 2100 when it gets dark and not at 10. and the other thing is that we don't spend a lot of time doing things that we don't need to so we get out of there when we are done with all of the flight training that we need. friday we started at 9 and we only took about an hour and a half. and we were back here by midnight. it is pretty nice when you don't have to spend a full 12 hours at the airfield.
saturday was also a nice day. we had some bad weather in the area so we only had the first of the two periods fly. i was supposed to fly the late period, but weather made it otherwise. we chained down the aircraft and then went home it was nice to get home early again.
on sunday there was only one flight period for the new crew chief that just got his up slip. we had a maintenance event on one of the helicopters that took about an hour. and then we changed a tire. we built up a couple of more tires just to have them ready. when the flight got back we finished up his helicopter and what we were doing and we were done for the day.
today was a very good day. we were supposed to have to take a PT test this morning and there were a few of us that were confused because we had passed the first pt test that we took a month ago. we found out yesterday that it was only for the people who needed a second chance at the test. so the people who had passed the first time didn't have to be there, and got to sleep in. at noon when i went outside, they had steak that was provided by one of the recently promoted Platoon Sergeants because he couldn't buy beer for us. the steak was really good. and it was a hell of a lot better than the d-fac food that we eat every day. after lunch a couple of guys and i went to the bowling alley we had a lot of fun we bowled 4 games and killed about 3 hours. it was a good time. after that we came back here and watched some tv. we hung out and ordered some pizza for dinner. after dinner i hung out with my roommates and talked about home for a while. it was nice to have a day off. we really didn't expect to have it off.
I hope that everyone at home is doing well.
Signing off

Been really busy

hey all,
I know that i said that i was going to try and write more, but i was really busy again this week! we have been going through aerial gunnery and that has kept us quite busy.
The first day we were firing from the ground on stationary helicopters. they weren't running so things were pretty good. we had about 800 rounds that we got to fire that day.
the next day was actually aerial gunnery. we did some flying that day. we each had 400 rounds to fire on two passes. and then another 200 rounds to fire under NBC conditions. it was fun because we actually were shooting and flying. there were a lot of targets along the range to keep us busy. i have to say that the best was the little house in the beginning. there were all sorts of things like cars old tanks and even got to shoot some fish.
the next night we were planning on doing our NVG firing. it was going to be a really late night for us. we were waiting for another company to get all of their people through the range and then we were going to go out to the range after that, but we are only supposed to work for 12 hours on days that we fly so that we don't get too overworked. they can give us extensions to go past the 12 hour days but every two hours you have to go up a command level, the first one goes to the company commander, then the battalion commander and the brigade commander. you push your luck when you are going to the battalion commander, but we were getting into the range that we needed to get to the brigade commander, and we probably would not have gotten the approval if we had gone that far up the chain. the reason that we were pushing our time limit was because they had us up and ready to go at 1 so that we could go through RFI (rapid fielding Initiative) which gave us a replacement for most of the woodland camo gear that we have like our old rucksack and Load bearing vest and other things like that. we were out at formation at 1 like they told us, and then the transportation that was supposed to get us there didn't show up so we waited for 20 minutes and then took our own little short bus to get there. then we stood in formation for the the next hour for them to get ready for us. once they were ready for us we went and got fitted for 4 new sets of ACUs which took about 15 minutes for the entire company. we then proceeded to line up so that we could wait for another hour. then we went through getting a new kevlar 2 new sets of boots. one that i will probably not wear (they are not flight approved). a replacement for the new $1200 that i have right now (they replaced it because the outer shell was woodland camo instead of the new digital camo. they gave us more long underwear, gloves, knee pads and elbow pads more gloves, and a few fleeces. then they gave us a winter hat, ear plugs, goggles and a new first aid kit. after all of that it took them about 20 mintutes to start checking people out even though all they needed us to do was sign two sheets of paper that they could print the instant that we were done getting all of our stuff. as we walked out we got a new ruck sack and a new load bearing system. all of that took us about 8 hours. it was a fast 8 hours but it still took 8 hours to do way too little. we were supposed to start firing around 1 and the range was supposed to take 5 or 6 hours that would put us way outside our window because we would have to take an hour to get the aircraft back and tied down and then it would take another 30 minutes to get us back and actually end the work day. so they decided that we would wait until the next night.
the next day was much better. we actually had our NBC firing that night. i thought i had seen a lot of things that looked like star wars in my day with tracers and ground fire, but you haven't seen anything more star wars like until you have watched a helicopter fly by shooting tracers. it looks like the orange lasers that the rebels fire from their x-wings. it is really cool looking. firing was even better under the NVGs you could see all of the rounds coming out of the barrel because of the heat signature.
the day after, we didn't have too much to do, we did a little bit of aircraft maintenance.
yesterday we had two flights scheduled and only went out on one. we did combat maneuvering flight. which is a lot of yanks and banks. it was a lot of fun kinda like a roller coaster ride. we didn't get to go on our NVG flight because the second period was canceled.
we did manage to get out tonight. and i am now a fully qualified crew chief. there really wasn't that much that happened to night we just needed to do multi-ship under NVGs so we followed another helicopter around for a while. but i am now a fully qualified crew chief. now all the training i do is practice and not introductions.
I hope that everyone at home is doing well.
signing off

sorry it has been so long!

Hi all
Sorry it has been so long since i posted last. i have been knee deep in training and i usually end up getting up going right to training and when i am all done going almost right to bed. I have done well in training lately we have gotten a lot of work done to getting me to the final stages of my crew chief training. after getting to RL-2 they wanted to get me to RL-1 Day/night as fast as they could, it isn't a lot of training so it isn't that hard. two flights at the most, you can do it with one if it is set up right. and once you make it up to RL-2 you can start your NVG training so i have been doing that as well. just so you know i will probably inadvertently say we every once in a while because the guy that i came over from the med company with and i have been doing almost all of our training together.
I will explain what i mean when i say training and RL-1,2, or 3. as a crew chief you have progression in the levels of things that you can do. When you start you are RL-3. you have to do everything with an SI or an FI. An SI is a standardization instructor, and an FI is a flight instructor. they are for crew chief training the SI of a company is the head FI. At RL-3 you end up doing a lot of training on what are called base tasks like airspace surveillance fuel checks and take offs and landings. you spend a lot of time as an RL-3 getting familiar with the aircraft and how everything works in-flight. after you get signed off on all of those tasks by your SI/FI you progress to RL-2 Day/Night and RL-3 NVG. RL-2 Day/Night is all mission task based. different things like terrain flight and multiship operations. RL-3 NVG is a combination of both base tasks and mission tasks. some of the base tasks that you do as a beginning RL-3 you don't need to repeat under NVGs but some you do. and you get some of the same mission tasks that you have RL-2 Day/night under RL-3 NVG. after you finish your tasks with RL-2 Day/night you are RL-1 Day night and you don't have to do anymore major training in that area until you have your annual check rides. progressing to RL-1 NVGs basically follows the same path and you just need to get some different tasks done under the NVGs.
Monday was supposed to be my first RL-2 flight. that ended up being canceled because we had an issue at start up that could have been a major problem if we didn't check it out. but when we did all of the maintenance checks everything turned out to be ok. i didn't get to log any time that night but i did get to go out on a flight with the goggles on it was pretty cool, but it would have been better if i had a chance to sit in the crew chief's seat and not in the middle.
Tuesday we had a day flight that we meant to get us up to RL-1. it went really well and the both of us went up to RL-1 day/night so that was a breakthrough for us not needing both day and night training. after that i had an NVG flight scheduled for later that night. we ended up not taking that flight because we had a bad radio that we needed to send messages to ground and we had a bad HUD (heads up display) for one of the pilots so we didn't get to go anywhere that night either.
Wednesday night I had a NVG flight that actually made it off of the ground. I was part of a two ship mission that i wouldn't be able to be on normally but was able to go because i had the SI with me. it was my first official NVG flight and we were only out for 1.5 hours. but it was really good training and i got most of the rl-3 tasks that i needed done. there were only about 6 tasks that i needed to get up to rl-2. The SI was impressed by how well i did with that flight and how well that i adapted to flying with goggles. (you know that teacher that you had, that no matter how hard you worked, everything that you did was mediocre until you did something amazing and then he gave you an off hand compliment and you were really surprised about it? that is this guy) he actually gave me a compliment and i was really surprised.
he wanted to make sure that we got the proper academics for the NVGs so he took some time out of his thursday to get us our Academics. we had to take a written test, it was 50 questions and i ended up getting a 48/50 on the test which i was very happy with. and that night we had our 2nd NVG flight. both the other guy from the med and i were trying to get to RL-2 Goggles so that we could do aerial gunnery (which is happening tomorrow) and actually qualify. you have to be qualified on the goggles to be able to fully qualify in aerial gunnery. i will get into that tomorrow or the next day. when we got our briefs he was mad because he ended up on one of the flights that was introduction training to one of the newer pilots and it sounded like he wasn't going to get outside of the traffic pattern of the airport. i went out with a different FI than the one that i had went out with the night before and i got all of the rest of my tasks taken care of.
Today we had a pretty easy day. we had to get ready for aerial gunnery so we had to take a written exam on the 240H which is the weapon that we have mounted on the crew windows on all of the helicopters. after we did that we had some down time to get hang out then we went to supper. from supper we went and got all of our flight gear because most of us won't be leaving from the airport to get to the range we will be driving and then hopping into aircraft to do the qualifying. after we we got back to the barracks we had a little more down time and then went out to get a basic overview of what was going to happen tomorrow. from there we had the rest of the night off. It was pretty nice because for the last I can't even remember anymore i haven't had a day to relax cause of all of the training on the aircraft that i have been doing.
I hope that everyone back home is doing well, and i am sorry that i have taken so long to put up another post. i will try and do a better jo b uf keeping this up to date and a tleast posting every other day.
I miss you all very much and can't wait til july to get home to see everyone!
Signing off

Flight time!

Hey!
Well, friday night i finally got my night unaided flight. it was a good flight; we went off the fort sill and flew around the cities around here. it was amazingly dark. the moon was not out at all that night so we had 0% illumination we were flying about 2000 ft and we couldn't see anything below us that wasn't lit up. i was happy because I finally progressed in my flight training to RL-2.
yesterday we did an RL-2 level flight. it was all terrain flight things flying under 200 ft above the ground. we did a nap of the earth route, which is less than 25 ft above the ground. that was really cool.
Tonight i have my first NVG (night vision goggles) flight. it should be really cool. i will let you know all about it!
hope everyone is doing well at home. Happy mothers day!
Signing off

Decemination of information/crew chief christmas

hello all,
sorry it has been a couple of days since my last post. been a lot of different things going on around here. since we have been in flight mode down here we have been starting to get the mass evaluations going on. monday we did NBC. and tuesday we did max performance flights. today we switched over to the night cycle to get NVG certifications for people who need them.
On monday we did NBC evals for the entire company. NBC for those who don't know is Nuclear Biological and Chemical. that is all the gas mask stuff. we have a full suit with rubber boots and gloves to go along with the mask. it is all very hot equipment to work in. everyone needed to be certified that they can do it on the aircraft. so they had 4 helicopters going. two were doing start up and shutdowns, the other two were traffic patterns. i was in my NBC equipment for about 15 minutes, which isn't bad. the jacket and pants of the NBC suit is lined with charcoal, so it can be very messy. right now we have the old style NBC suits because they are for training and they need all the new ones for deployed soldiers. when we get in country we will get new NBC suits. there were a few people who had new NBC ended up with very black uniforms from all of the charcoal in them.
yesterday (tuesday) we did max performance training. that doesn't change much for me, but we still needed to be certified that we were on a max performance flight. when we went out for start up we had 11 people on board. 6 crew chiefs and 5 pilots. we were going through start up checks and had a stabilator failure. so we ended up switching aircraft. after that we went out to to the training area. we got through two sets of people then we were pulled back into the airfeild because of weather. we watched the weather for a while after we put the aircraft away. the weather was far enough that we really were safe from anything that was happening. we saw a few funnel clouds form but never touch down. we went to the tornado shelter for 15 minutes after that.
today we switched to what the army calls reverse cycle. basically working the night shift. we didn't have to be anywhere until 4 pm today originally. Me and one of my roommates went out and did PT at noon and then went to the PX and alterations. we were back around 2:30 and went to the room for a while. i was talking to a friend when a knock at the door comes at about 3:20. it is my squad leader and formation time had changed without anyone telling about half the company. we ended up just standing around until 4 so it was pointless to get out there 30 minutes earlier, but it was dumb because my platoon sergreant was giving us a hard time because we didn't know what time formation was even though we were never told. when we got out to the airfield we pulled all of the aircraft that were flying out to the flight line. then the people who had flights started pre-flighting. by 7 the flights had been canceled do to weather again. so we did some classes and we had Crew Chief cristmas. the SI or head crew chief did a lot of letter writing and got us the funding for certain things that he thought that we might need. today we got a pair of WileyX sunglasses. a gerber multi-tool, a quick open knife and a finger light. the WileyX sunglasses are balistic glasses that we can wear all the time. the multi tool is good for doing daily inspections of the aircraft. the quick release knife is good for survival situations. the fingerlight is a aircraft approved light that can be used while flying under NVGs. and it is very tactical when it comes to being seen by the enemy compared to the lip light that is the other option.
On a side note, news of the general and his fishing buddy that we were looking for this weekend. on tuesday we were in line for the chow hall and we passed a newspaper stand. the general and his buddy was found. they were both on the bottom of the lake. the divers found them on monday. we don't know the reason that they were drowned. but probably had something to do with the rapidly changing weather that we have been having down here. it is sad.
i hope that everyone at home is doing well.
Signing off

try and try again

hey all,
so things haven't been bad. yesterday we were playing infantry so we got to do things like talking on radios and set up claymores. a bunch of stuff that we aren't going to be using while we are over there. we spent most of the day out there, but at least we had some time after.
today wasn't that bad, other than i didn't get my 5th try at getting my night unaided flight. we didn't have to be anywhere until noon and then when we got to the hanger we didn't have anything to do right away and then i ended up getting to come back to the barracks because i had a night flight. so we came back here til dinner and then we went back out to the airfield.
after that we started the preflight stuff. we didn't get to start up and the weather stopped us. but officially i did nothing today. so it can't be all bad.
hope everything is ok at home!
signing off

air time and down time

so the last three days have been pretty interesting. wednesday was pretty nice because even though i wasn't flying i had all of my work done by 3 so i was able to get away from the hanger and get some things done. i had some things sown on one of my uniforms and picked up a few more essential things.
yesterday was my RL progression flight. i have been waiting on that flight since i was going in on orders about a month before we left. we tried 3 times while we were there and it was canceled all three times do to weather or maintenance. because the flight that i needed was at night we didn't have to be anywhere until lunch time when we needed to be out at formation. from there we went to the hanger, and waited. all the dailies were done and the aircraft were on the flight line. so all we could do was wait. we waited and went to supper and then came back to the airfield to wait a little while longer. at 7:30 we had our mission brief and got all of the pre-flight stuff done. we went out to the aircraft to start up the aircraft for the mission. the aircraft was on a fly-over from earlier in the day so we only had to do certain checks while starting up. we had both engines started and at idle and then we had a generator failure. it blew the #1 & #2 converter circuit breakers. that was a red x condition no flight for me. :(. oh well the commander has already scheduled me for another night flight for sunday. i will be RL 2 then. after that i get to start flying NVGs; i am excited for that. we waited for everyone else who had flights last night to get back in so we could help them take their stuff in and get home faster. so we were out at the airfield til midnight anyways.
today was a lot of fun for me. I had some real world tasks that i got to perform. I was supposed to fly at 2. we had a briefing on Arabic and the Iraqi culture in the morning and that went on til about 12:30. around 12 the first seargent walked in and asked for the crew of the two flights going out at 2 to come with him. there were two pilots and me who were already in our flight uniforms so we went straight to the hanger. the others went back to the barracks to get changed. when i got to the hanger i found out that i wasn't going to be doing the training that was originally planned. we were going to be doing a real search and rescue mission. apparently there was a retired general who liked to fish on a little lake down on the western side of Fort Sill, and he hadn't come home the night before and his wife reported him missing. the crew of my helicopter was going out to see if we could help find him. the commander had to talk to D company to get an aircraft assigned to this mission. when he told me the tail number i was suspect about being able to use that aircraft because i remembered it being used the night before and it hadn't gotten it's daily done yet. so i went and got the log book and double check and sure enough it didn't have a daily and it couldn't fly. so i had to go get another logbook (by the way a log book is a laptop in a huge protective case) for the bird that we ended up taking out for the mission. we were in the air 30 minutes from when we started planning for the mission. we flew out to the site where the general was fishing and we picked up a few policemen to come up to help us scan the lake. we made 2 slow, low passes side to side on the lake looking for anything important that might give us a clue. on one of the first passes we found a hat that probably belong to the general or his fishing buddy. we didn't find anything else in our sweeps. from there we dropped the policemen back off and went searching in the surrounding areas. we went a klick and a half in every direction searching for the general or his buddy, but saw no signs. we searched until we were close to our reserve time with fuel and then we had to go back. they had quite the ground crew out there. we were not going to be much more help so we didn't send out another helicopter after us. as of right now they have not found him, which is too bad. they will find him soon i am sure.
I hope that everything is going well at home!
Signing off

First day of flight

Today was my first flight of training. today was not a bad day, but that was just the first day and i know that it won't stay this way. Today because i was part of the flight crews i had it pretty easy. I didn't have to be at morning chow because we had flights and most of the flights were going out at 7pm and we were going out at 2pm. we got up at 9 and hung out until lunch. after lunch we went to the hanger and we set up to go on our flight and then left. by the time we got back it was time for dinner and we came back, finished picking up our flight gear and put it away. when we were done with all of that we went back to the barracks and we were done for the day.
The flight was pretty good. we did an LAO (land area orientation) it was a lot of fun because you get to see a lot of things that you don't get to see in Minnesota. not that Minnesota is bad, but it is really flat. one of the things that we flew by was called medicine bluffs. the Comanche Indians would take the sick up to the top of this cliff and they would either heal them or they would throw them off. it was kind of interesting. we saw a lot of the different ranges and the things to go with all of the artillery firing that goes on down here. and it was really interesting because it was mostly sunny but one part of the reservation (what we call fort sill) had an isolated thunderstorm moving through it and it was directly over one of the routes that we were supposed to take so we went around that one and stayed outside of the storm. it was actually kind of interesting flying with the sun on one side and a storm on the other. we flew around for 2 hours on the different flight corridors then we came back to the hanger and did a few simulated emergency procedures for one of the pilots on the way in.
i hope that everyone at home is having a good time!
signing off

I thought that waiting at the land nav was bad!

So i thought that the waiting for 3 or for hours at the land nav course was bad. we were at the 9mm range on friday, and there were three companies which is around 150 people. we woke up at 5 so that we could draw our weapons before we went to the range. We had just enough time to get get our weapons before we went to chow and then straight to the range. they only had 1 bus for all of us to get to chow so they shuttled us to chow. from there they managed to have enough buses but because they were shuttling people and we weren't the first group to go over we ended up being the last group to get to fire. we arrived at the range at about 8:30 and waited around until almost 3 pm before we fired and then we spent about 20 minutes on the range firing and then we spent another 5 hours waiting. until 8 pm. the only thing that we did besides eat in those time periods was clean up the casings for the spent rounds. now normally at ranges when you expend ammo you have to pick up the expended ammo, that is just fine, clean up after yourselves. but at this range they wanted you to be 100% accountable for the brass that you expended. that means that we had to pick up rounds for 150+people at 57 rounds a person and account for every single one of them. let do the math shall we... 150x57=8,550 rounds and that doesn't count the people who had to re-qualify. when we collected them all off the ground we had to put them back in the foam containers of 50 rounds. that is a lot of foam containers. then when we were all done with that we ended up just sitting around until it was dark out. to go along with all of this, the range safeties are telling us that when we are sitting around in the parking lot (nowhere near the range) that we can't take out helmets and vests off, and we can't lay down even though we have been out there for forever. we waited until 8:45 to do the night fire and they ran that extremely slowly. The army gave us a whole new definition of hurry up and wait.
Saturday was not bad at all we did some of the hurry up and wait, but we were done with everything by about 3 so it wasn't as bad, especially after what we had the day before. We did EST training and it is basically firing the m16/m4 video game style. we got to the trainer about 8:30 like normal, and again had to wait until after lunch to get to do anything.
yesterday was a little bit better version of the m9 range. we were on the m4 range and we had to zero the m4s so there were two stations that you had to go through for qualifying.
the zero part of the range went pretty fast for most people. i had my m4 zeroed in 12 shots. there are 15 hole in my paper because on the second three rounds the guy next to me accidentally shot my paper instead of his own. once you were done zeroing you had to walk down to the qualification range. i was lucky enough to get out to the qual range pretty quickly and be in one of the first firing orders. When we got out onto the lane i was all ready to go. i was shooting great at the zero range and I was all excited to shoot and get my expert for the 2nd time. the ranges were a little different because instead of the old foxhole supported we did prone supported. and instead of doing 20 rounds in prone unsupported we did 10 rounds prone unsupported and 10 rounds in kneeling. i wasn't too worried about any of the new stuff because the kneeling only fires at the 150m and closer. But when we got out and started firing the first two targets went down without a problem. they were 50 and 200 meters not very hard targets. the next one goes out at the 300 and i miss it. i was thinking ok, that is a hard target to hit and i missed it. i deal with and move on thinking that i will hit the next one, i catch a few of the closer ones and go on to another farther target and i miss it again. it starts to worry me when i am shooting these targets and they aren't going down. the spotter that i have is telling me that i hit the target but they aren't going down. i ended up hitting 14 targets that round needing 23 to qualifying. when i got to concurrent training i saw a few people there that i never thought would be in that building. we went through all of that and when everyone who had qualified was done we started talking and we got to talking about the 1st seargent and one other guy in the company who are u.s. competition quality shooters, both of them had streaks of shooting expert for at least 13 years. both of them barely qualified. so i started thinking that it wasn't as bad. we were out there all until about 8 waiting for people to qualify. the people running the range thought that we were doing awesome with qual rates at about 50%, that is worse than most basic training ranges. and on the last firing order we went through we had a bunch of open slots for people who had already qualed. and when we made it through those orders the guy came down and thought that it was amazing that we had that many qualified and that it proved that there couldn't have been anything wrong with their system because that many people had qualed. little did they know that we stacked the firing line with some of the best shooters. when we got all of the got out of the day qual we had to do night qual, this range was ready to do this really fast. so we managed to get out of there at a relatively decent time.
to make it even better we are starting our flight training tomorrow so we had a reset day today to get the rest that we didn't get the last three days. it was nice i slept until 10 and didn't have to get to anywhere so i just sat around. it was nice!
tomorrow i have my first flight
i hope that everyone is doing well at home
signing off

Land Nav the the worthless classes to go with!

Yesterday we went to two classes that took all day. the worst part was that they could have scheduled it for the morning and we could have gotten it done before lunch. to make things worse, the classes that we had to take had nothing to do with the things that we were doing today or anything that we will be doing over in Iraq. The first class that we had was the PLGR (plugger as we call it) it is the old army version of a GPS, but it is the size of a 1980's cell phone and ways just about as much as my laptop. The other class was the ground singars class. Singars is the secure radio that they use in the ground vehicles and by infantry men. it is a nice radio compared to what they used to be like, but we will never use it. we have radios built into the aircraft and emergency radios that we have in our vests if we ever go down. after both classes we had a very long time before we got to leave the training area because the buses only come at chow time and we were done at least an hour before chow for both of the classes.
Today we did our land nav training. there are two parts to the land nav training. Mounted and dismounted. Mounted is using a humvee to navigate around a map. we had a DAGR (dagger) which is the new version of the PLGR. it works very well, even though we really had no idea how to use them. That part of the nav was really easy because the GPS took us to right where we needed to be. the second part of the nav was a lot harder, we had 3 hours to go about 5 km on foot over rough terrain and we had the hardest of the point combinations. we took almost the whole three hours to get the points. all three companies that went through that were done by about 2 and we had to sit and wait because the instructors had thought that because we were the largest group that they had ever run they would need to get chow for us because we would be there late. once that was done we couldn't change what was going on. if they would not have changed the training schedule we would have been able to get back to the barracks by about 2 or so and be done for the day. but instead we sat around for an hour then they made some random points for us to go find walking around with the DAGR to kill time. then we had to wait for another hour for chow to get there. the only thing that really made that better was that the buses showed up early because the battalion commander started looking into why everything had got screwed up.
Other than sitting around all afternoon in the hot sun, it wasn't a bad day.
I hope that everyone at home is doing well and that they are having fun
Signing off

Live fire and the rain!

Yesterday we were out at the range firing the m249. over all it was a fun time though i think that the whole range and communications could have gone better. There were 12 of us at the range 4 from each company with 2 weapons from each company. Right away when we got there we had a mishap with communications. the m249 has a dts-4 night site, kind of like night vision goggles, and we unknowingly were supposed to bring these to the range, and it was our fault that we didn't bring them. and when the 1lt left with the van while we were still in the middle of unloading she took our MREs so at lunch time we needed to wait to get our lunch. right when we started firing we had two weapons break. one had a broken spring in the feed tray and the other the charging handle was binding. so there were 4 weapons for 12 people to qualify on and only the first people to shoot got to zero the weapon. overall firing the weapon was a lot of fun, but all of the hoops that we had to jump through kind of made it kind of stressful.
today has been pretty interesting we were supposed to have a relaxing day with not much to do. and things definitely changed. instead of getting to relax after breakfast we had to take the PT test that we were going to be taking thursday we took after breakfast. after showering and resting for about 30 minutes we went down stairs for lunch and instead of eating lunch we ended up going to move aircraft into hangers because it was supposed to be really stormy. we got out there and they wanted two more birds moved into the hangers. there were two tug drivers and nobody else moving aircraft. the 8 people that went out to get the last two birds and when we got them into the hanger there were a bunch of other people from B and C companies sitting in the hanger. By this time we were SOAKING wet. we had our gortex jackets on and we were still wet underneath them, and my pants were drenched. it was raining hard enough that my gortex jacket was holding water in the pockets. by the time that we had picked up our kevlars, it had stopped raining. we spent the next hour moving more aircraft into different configurations in different hangers. There were a lot of pilots there because there were supposed to be flights going on. those pilots thought that they were the experts on moving aircrafts. it took probably twice the amount of time. they were trying to put 10 aircraft in a hanger that was built for 8 at the most.
after that we had time to relax. i read about 75 pages in my book and then fell asleep. we went to chow came back and went to prep for the land nav class that we will be doing on thursday.
i hope that everyone at home is doing well! i hope to hear from you soon!
Signing Off

Weapons day two

today was more of the same as yesterday, but with bigger weapons. We worked with the 249 saw and the m240B/H.
If you want a relative picture of what I am talking about when i say a bunch of names of weapons. I will start with the smallest. The M-9 is a Handgun and all black. It fires a 9 mm round. That is a big round, but it is smaller on the handgun side, they are usually a .308 or a .45 caliber round. it is very accurate, but not very powerful. it ways about 3 pounds
The m-4 is a rifle that is a semi-automatic. that means that it will reload itself but it is not fully automatic. the m-4 is a 5.56 mm round. small compact and accurate. it is not very powerful but it will do enough damage that if you don't kill the enemy you will do enough to keep the enemy from getting back up. it can handle up to a 30 round magazine. it has two fire settings single and burst. in single fire mode it will fire a single shot. in burst it will fire 3. this is the primary weapon that a soldier carries. It is the upgraded model of the m-16. the m-4 ways 7-8 pounds fully loaded.
The 249 is a beefed up version of the m-16. the 249 is also known as the squad automatic weapon. it is a fully automatic weapon. it is usually fired in 5-8 round bursts, but if the trigger is held down it will expend all of the ammo that it can. it also fires the the ammo comes in anything from a 30 round magazines that is used in a m-4 to the 200 round drums that are supposed to be attached. it ways a little less than 20 pounds. I am assigned one of these, because it is very likely that they are not going to be used in country and the first sergeant wanted to give the lowest ranking of the company a chance to get some extra training, and have some fun while doing it.
If the 249 is a big version of the m-4, the m240b/h is a big version of the 249. It fires a 7.62 round, which is much more powerful than the 5.56 round that the m-4 and the 249 fire. it is the weapon that we will have mounted on the aircraft in the crew windows. these we will be using anytime that we fly. it has two trigger systems for the different types of firing, ground and mounted. the ground is set up with a butt stock and regular trigger. the mounted trigger, used for humvees and helicopters. it has a butterfly handle and a trigger that is fired by the thumbs.

here are some links that will explain the weapons a little better than I can
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M9_pistol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_carbine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M249_Squad_Automatic_Weapon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M240_machine_gun

i have been having a good day, things are going well, i hope everyone else has too.
signing off

First of many days with my Weapons

Hey all
things here are going well, we had a few down days since i last posted, there really wasn't much to tell about. we went to a few classes about safety that a 5 year old could have taught. and we spend a lot of time waiting for things that didn't ever happen.
yesterday we did get something very important, we got our ground body-armor. and just so you know, i will probably refer to it from now on as my turtle shell. with all of the pieces we look like teenage mutant ninja turtles. It ways about 30 pounds and is very cumbersome to put on, but one you get it on you can't really feel the wait because it is very well balanced. there is a big plate in the front and in the back, and there is also two side plates that cover under my arms. it also has flak deflectors that go around the neck, arms, groin, and and underarm. It is pretty cool, and it is going to save my butt if i am getting shot at.
now to the weapons! Today was the first of many days that we have drawn our weapons. I am going to be signed for a m-9 (9 mm Beretta handgun) and an m-4 (colt rifle, versatile more compact version of the m-16). Those two weapons are my personal weapons. we spent all day learning how to take them apart and put them together and get as close to making sure that they fire without putting a bullet in them. when we were done with the classes we did some dry firing of of the m-4 with laser system to train us in zeroing the weapon.
Just a side note, it takes a while for mail to get here for some reason so it will take me a while to respond, but i promise if i get mail i will reply by mail it is really nice to get snail mail too.
I hope that everyone is doing well back hope!
Signing Off

blood and briefings

Hey all!
This weekend was really interesting! Saturday Sunday and Monday were set up for the Combat Life Saver class. That is a lot of gross medical stuff that people who hate needles have a hard time doing. The first day we spend learning things like how to provide care under fire and giving an IV. That stuff is really interesting. We actually get to give people IVs that day. Needles and everything. There is a lot of blood flowing that day. the second day was all about breathing and opening airways. We talked about blocked airways and punctured lungs. The human on human exercise that day was a Nasal pharyngeal. that is a 9 mm tube that goes in your nose to your throat. we had to do this to each other. when i went to get mine the instructor walked up and looked at my nose, he said that i have really small nasal passages and that they might now want to try and do this to my nose. i let them try just to let them have the chance, but it wouldn't go down. that was a really interesting feeling having a tube in your throat. The other major thing that we talked about were punctured lungs. if you seal the wound that punctures your lung and you are still having problems you stick it with a giant needle to let the air out of the sac around the lung as to give the internal organs more space to work. that needle is huge. that evening we got all of the people who hadn't gotten to stick people with IVs finished. i had three holes in my arm from 2 people that night. The third day of CLS was all about the written test. I got 100% on that test which makes me very happy. it was a good day overall.
today was the total opposite. we sat in an auditorium all day listening to different briefings on things like Equal opportunity, sexual harassment, and others. it was a pretty boring day, but that meant that i got a lot of reading done between the briefings. and it is the first day since the night that we moved in that we have had some time to relax before 8 pm. it has been pretty nice. well, everyone have a good night
Signing off

My first full day so far

Hey!
I am now down at Fort Sill Oklahoma! We are starting all of the training that we will need for Iraq. We left from St. Paul yesterday morning, flew over the VFW in Crystal then flew over the State capital and the St. Paul Airport. We have three stops. the first at Boone Airbase outside of Des Moines Iowa then we stopped at a small airbase in Kansas and had lunch. after that we went to Tinker Air Force base in Oklahoma (the air force guys have it NICE!) from there it was a short flight to home sweet home Fort Sill. We logged 6.7 hours in the aircraft, but it was about 9 hours down here. (your butt hurts when you sit that long.) Today we took care of some medical processing and have a break before we have to get to our evening briefings. the weather down here is pretty wet, but that makes training all the more fun and different. so far it has not been a bad time down here.
Signing off